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transitions are rough sometimes. i knew this going into it but there are things, for which, you can never fully plan. our mind has so many things working at once; eleven million pieces of data per second, to be exact. and i can feel the weight of those on occasion.

our conscious mind, however, only takes in forty of the eleven million. so we are really caught in a wave that is beyond our control, at any given point. but somehow we handle it. somehow we make it to shore. most of the time.

this last week i moved out of the house that i’ve lived in for the last seven years, that my son was born in. a wretched and beautiful experience. physical and emotional land mines going off along the road for the five minutes it took me to reach my new house. and i started to think about my daughter’s school. it’s a public school, but it has a “waldorf”-inspired curriculum and pedagogy. one of the fundamental principles in the whole waldorf thing is that growth and learning happen in seven year cycles. my son, my daughter, my former wife and i all spent the better part of the last year in our seven year cycle, all at the same time. i was 35, she was 28, isabel 8 and jake 6. and it was a major fucking thing. our whole family had to go through what amounted to a series of natural disasters. we were constantly on the brink of utter failure.

but we made it through. somehow we made it back to shore. intact and still a family, even if we live in different houses. it’s a testament to our kids that their mother and i kept it together emotionally and navigated, as best we could, through the worst parts of this separation. i hope. i don’t know though. i don’t really need to know, i guess. no way i could know. a forty to eleven million chance.

i have been off my game with the whole move, not able to do anything except think way to much about furniture and rugs. my work, my writing. it all sort of fell away. i am creating a separate identity, a new reality, for me for my kids. one that can feel connected, even if it is separate. this paternal instinct sort of took precedent and, as hard as i tried, i couldn’t focus on anything else. powerlessness is such a rush.

i transcended my normal patterns and it gave me a chance to look into some of the cracks in the architecture. I got to dip into the eleven million for a new set of forty things i can think about, per second. i’ll see what i can do with these forty, before the next transition comes.